No Exit

"Once More, With Feeling" / "No Exit" / "In Excess" / "Holocaust!"
Astonishing X-Men #1-4 [1995]
Written by Scott Lobdell
Pencils by Joe Madureira
Inks by Tim Townshend, Dan Green, and Al Milgrom

"Age of Apocalypse" is a fun story and fan experience, but when I look at those issues now I mostly see a formal experiment that went very, very well. The creators who worked on the book – basically a small army led by X-Men lead writers Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza – were all recent inheritors of the X-Men franchise, which was still very much defined by Chris Claremont's 17-year run on Uncanny X-Men. Those creators were all fans who'd lucked into running the show after Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, and Whilce Portacio bailed on Marvel to form Image Comics in 1992, and mostly seemed to be doing their best to please fans of their predecessors through 1994. “Age of Apocalypse” wasn't just a sales stunt event, but an opportunity for all these writers and artists to flex and do something totally new that was an expression of their creativity rather than merely their adaptability.

The premise of the "Age of Apocalypse" is that the reader is tossed into a totally different X-world in which Charles Xavier died before founding the X-Men and the X-Men are instead led by Magneto on a planet which has been largely conquered by a despotic Apocalypse. The writers took this opportunity to radically reinterpret the franchise as a way of putting ironic twists on familiar characters – Beast and Cyclops are now baddies, Sabretooth is now a hero – but to build on then-recent narrative themes such as Nightcrawler discovering that his mother is Mystique or Iceman realizing that his low self-esteem has led him to not fully explore the possibilities of his powers. Nicieza took his X-Men book as an opportunity to add some details to Exodus, a major villain who was entirely vague at that moment, and Lobdell explored Sunfire, the temperamental Japanese X-Man who quit almost immediately after joining the team in Giant Size X-Men #1 and only appeared occasionally since. The plot of “Age of Apocalypse” is fine enough, but in the moment and to this day, the real thrill of it was in seeing the results of the creators going wild with the source material.

Astonishing X-Men has always been my favorite of the "Age of Apocalypse" mini-series, largely because it's illustrated by Joe Madureira just as he was hitting his stride. Madureira, only 20 years old at the time, is the definitive AOA artist and is responsible for the majority of the most memorable designs used in the event. In this series we get Sunfire, radically transformed into a being of living flame with a mask and bits of black armor to give definition to the contours of his body. There's Blink, a character he'd designed for the previous year's “Phalanx Covenant” event, remade from a cowardly young girl into a confident and heroic figure playing the Kitty Pryde/Jubilee ingenue role in this squad of X-Men. Madureira's most startling design is for the newly created villain Holocaust, who is basically a burning skeleton locked inside a hulking battle suit entirely comprised of clear armor.

Whereas the other artists drawing issues of the "Age of Apocalypse" event were working in the general stylistic milieu of Lee and Liefeld, Madureira's clean, cartoony line and dynamic storytelling style was more like Paul Smith channeled through the aesthetics of Japanese animation. Madureira's work here would turn out to be as influential and transformative as Arthur Adams and Jim Lee before him, and was crucial in establishing a new style for X-Men that was not based in emulating departed talent.

By the time Lobdell had started on Astonishing X-Men he'd had plenty of practice in writing ensemble casts, and in this mini-series he was showing off how naturally the rhythm of it all came to him while establishing a lot of world building. He fills out the tragic backstory of this Sunfire, establishes this version of Sabretooth as a rough equivalent of Wolverine totally at odds with the irredeemable monster he was writing in proper continuity as if to provoke a nature vs nurture argument, and makes Blink so cool and fun that Marvel editorial would have to go out of its way to create the dimension-hopping Exiles series as a way of bending the rules of continuity to satisfy fan demand given that the "real" version was killed off shortly after being introduced. The relationship between Sabretooth and Blink is particularly powerful, echoing the surrogate father/daughter dynamic of Wolverine and Jubilee but more poignant given the dystopian backdrop of the story. (It's worth noting that Lobdell and Nicieza very obviously patterned their regular continuity version of Sabretooth on Hannibal Lecter, so giving Blink the name Clarice has an interesting charge to it.)

Lobdell's cast of Astonishing X-Men is so different from the one that he was writing in Uncanny X-Men that the only character in both casts is Rogue, and this version of Rogue is a very different person. This Rogue is married to Magneto and co-leader of the X-Men, and carries herself with a gravitas far different from the loose cannon energy of her regular continuity counterpart. The most intriguing AOA versions of characters answer the question of "what if this X-Man had a totally different life?" in ways that invert what we know about them in compelling ways – a sullen Nightcrawler without Catholic dogma, a demented and sadistic Beast, or a smug and immensely powerful Iceman. Seeing those characters without constraints is a revelation, whereas Rogue without the burdens of her power or having to live down bad decisions of her past just makes her come across like a generic superhero.

Welcome to Genosha

“Welcome to Genosha” / “Busting Loose” /
“Who’s Human?” / “Gonna Be A Revolution”
Uncanny X-Men #235-238 (1988)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by Marc Silvestri (236, 238) 
and Rick Leonardi (235, 237)
Inks by Dan Green (236, 238), P. Craig Russell (235), 
and Terry Austin (237)

“Welcome to Genosha” is one of the most politically charged stories of Chris Claremont’s original 17 year tenure of writing Uncanny X-Men and its associated titles, and introduces the island nation of Genosha, which in retrospect is his last major conceptual contribution to the X-Men mythos. Genosha is a country which has quietly enslaved its mutant population for its economic gain, and have developed nightmarish brainwashing techniques that reduce mutants to docile, obedient workers who live only to use their powers to serve the state. 

Genosha was clearly inspired in part by apartheid-era South Africa, but the severity of the situation was ultimately Claremont showing us a worst case scenario of how humans might treat mutants that’s as grim as the death camps of “Days of Future Past” but more plausible in the sense that it’s unlikely a capitalist system would prefer to exterminate a resource as potentially profitable as mutants. Genosha is, on a conceptual level, a dark reversal of Wakanda – whereas the latter fictional African nation is a sci-fi Afrofuturism fantasy of a black nation that was able to make major scientific achievements without the intervention of Europeans, Genosha’s advanced science is a direct result of exploiting mutant labor. The mutants of Genosha are collectively responsible for the existence of the high-tech weapons and processes that shackle them. 

The story is a logical conclusion of a path that Claremont set his characters on starting with the “Mutant Massacre.” Under Storm’s leadership the X-Men became more ruthless and radical, and focused more on shutting down threats and pursuing justice for mutants than in promoting Charles Xavier’s dream of peaceful cohabitation of humans and mutants. Storm would never disavow those goals, but she was driven mainly by pragmatism and moral outrage. The Genosha arc tests the militancy of Storm’s X-Men – when faced with the absolute worst of humanity and a morally bankrupt society, what would they do? Would the X-Men actually overthrow a corrupt government? 

Of course they would. But in doing so, the X-Men have to abandon their role as superheroes to become revolutionaries. Superheroes traditionally exist to prop up a status quo, and under Xavier’s leadership the X-Men’s goals were mostly focused on protecting a society that hated them in the interest of gradual assimilation. Storm’s X-Men have no interest in protecting a corrupt social order, so in this story Claremont can present a fantasy of extremely powerful minority figures smashing a system. The conclusion of this arc is all catharsis – the Genoshan state is shattered, the “mutates” are liberated, and the X-Men head back home in the end. It’s a satisfying conclusion, but it’s hardly the end of the story. A couple years later in “X-Tinction Agenda” we find out that Genosha was only briefly set back by the X-Men’s intervention and their violent actions only further radicalized their government. The X-Men can damage the system, but without the necessary tedious and difficult ongoing work of building a better society, the worst elements will persist.

This story marks the end of Claremont’s initial arc for Storm. He writes her out of the series for a little while after “Inferno,” and his last significant Storm story of his original run was a drastic left turn involving her being regressed to childhood. To some extent, the Genosha story represents what the X-Men ought to be – full-on revolutionary freedom fighters –but that role would be difficult to maintain in the format of a shared-universe superhero comic. Like, if the X-Men are going to overthrow Genosha, why not the United States too?

But this political radicalism is the appropriate end point of Storm’s leadership of the X-Men. She is not someone who is willing to let unjust systems stand, and will do whatever it takes to smash racist, patriarchal, and fascist capitalist states. It’s odd how much of this aspect of Storm has been erased in subsequent years – many writers forget her passion and “by any means necessary” approach, and while Cyclops took on a similar form of radicalism through this decade, every writer cast her as fundamentally opposed to these moves despite the number of major canonical Claremont stories that would suggest that she’d more likely look to his efforts and think “yes, finally.” 

The Genosha arc was published bi-weekly in the run-up to the “Inferno” crossover, and as a matter of scheduling, was illustrated by regular series artist Marc Silvestri and recurring guest artist Rick Leonardi. Leonardi’s art is strong but has never been to my taste – there’s something about the contrast of roundness and scratchiness in his linework that has never been appealing to me. Silvestri, however, is one of my all-time favorite X-Men artists. He’s sort of an odd figure now – somewhere in the mid-90s his work severely devolved on a technical level, but through the late ‘80s he’s a top-notch draftsman with a rough but elegant style that pulls as much from classic fashion illustration as it emulates the grounded realism of old school Marvel artists like Joe Kubert and John Buscema. Silvestri’s men are grizzled and macho, and his women are rendered like pop stars and supermodels but somehow more beautiful. As idealized as his heroes get, his pages are rooted in recognizable settings full of average-looking people for contrast. 

Claremont, always so good with playing to his artists’ strengths, gradually took the glossy sensuality of Silvestri’s artwork – along with the creative blank check that came as a result of Uncanny X-Men’s massive sales and the recent departure of micromanaging Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter – as license to push the X-Men into explicitly horny territory. A large chunk of the Genosha arc is devoted to a subplot about Madelyne Pryor’s corruption and transformation into the vengeful Goblin Queen prior to “Inferno.” These pages, many of which take place in abstracted fever dreams, present Pryor’s trauma and rage but also her emerging extreme sexuality. 

Claremont’s X-Men had always featured subtextual nods to his interest in BDSM and roleplaying but with Silvestri he was pushing it all to the surface. Pryor spends all of Inferno wearing an insanely revealing costume that’s deliberately trashy as a way to taunt and scandalize her ex-husband Cyclops. Cyclops’ brother Havok, who at this point is fully seduced by Pryor, ends up wearing even less – pretty much just a loincloth, and a fairly skimpy loincloth at that. Mister Sinister, who was designed by Silvestri, ends up looking like a leather daddy goth dom in this context. It’s wild stuff, and even more so when you consider that the overwhelming majority of the readership at the time – including myself – were children. I appreciate the subversive energy behind these comics, and respect the overwhelming horniness of it all. It’s certainly the work of eccentric individuals rather than sanitized corporate content. They were going waaaaay over the top at a time when comics were still mostly quite old fashioned in story and art, so it’s hardly a surprise that these issues sold in outrageous quantities relative to most anything else. 

One Down

“One Down”
All-New X-Men #26-29 (2014)
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Pencils by Stuart Immonen
Inks by Wade von Grawbadger

Stuart Immonen has been working steadily in mainstream comics since the early 1990s but has over the course of this decade become one of the best and most widely imitated artists in the industry. If Marvel has a “house style” in the mid-to-late 2010s, it’s a post-Immonen look, and the two artists drawing the initial wave of Jonathan Hickman X-Men comics – R.B. Silva and Pepe Larraz – are highly gifted pencilers whose aesthetics nevertheless boil down to “I can’t believe it’s not Stuart Immonen.”

It certainly takes a lot of skill to mimic Immonen. His draftsmanship is excellent, he’s brilliant with facial expressions and body language, and he’s particularly gifted in rendering lighting for dramatic effect. Larraz and Silva, while each having some identifiable stylistic flair on their own, have come to draw their pages with very Immonen-ish designs and rhythms, and the particular line weights of his illustrations. They didn’t always draw quite like this, so it seems like a reasonable assumption that they’ve adjusted to market demands. If that’s the case, the very fact that they are drawing the ultra-hyped House of X and Powers of X launch would prove that to be a winning strategy. 

Immonen himself has not worked for Marvel for over a year, and has shifted his attention to other projects after completing a run with Dan Slott on Amazing Spider-Man with issue #800. This was the culmination of a period in which Immonen was clearly Marvel’s top artist, during which he only worked on high profile comics with top writers – Fear Itself with Matt Fraction, All-New X-Men with Brian Michael Bendis, Captain America with Rick Remender, and Star Wars with Jason Aaron. Though Fear Itself was the flagship title of a crossover event, his work on All-New X-Men was his true star-making work. Immonen, whose aesthetics have shifted over the years while always retaining core strengths, had fully solidified into what is now his iconic style with All-New X-Men. His style was a fresh look for the X-Men – very earthy and grounded in its action, and elegant in rendering the emotional details of Bendis’ very soapy approach to the series.

All-New X-Men #26 is the opening chapter of Immonen’s final arc on the series before handing the book over to rising star Mahmud Asrar. The story is mostly about the return of the future Brotherhood, who were the antagonists of the “Battle of the Atom” crossover from a year before. The primary cast of All-New X-Men were the time-displaced original five X-Men from the ‘60s – teenage versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Iceman, and Angel. They were brought to the present by the adult Beast to emotionally torture the adult Cyclops after Cyclops appeared to have murdered their mutual father figure, Charles Xavier. 

The future Brotherhood, who originally present themselves as the X-Men of the future, are mainly focused on trying to get the original X-Men to return to their place in the timeline, but turn out to be driven more by a hatred of the X-Men and their failures. The future Brotherhood is led by a son of Charles Xavier who looks just like his father and has all of his powers, and has a grudge against the X-Men for not honoring his dad and his vision. “They stand on my grave and they speak of his legacy and they have done nothing but make a mockery of it,” he explains near the end of this arc. “The X-Men murdered him and then went on like nothing happened. They moved into his house and they took his money and they didn’t even have the courtesy to keep his name on the school he built.” 

Charles Junior may be a psychopath with childish grudges, but he’s not entirely wrong. His read on the X-Men and their reckless behavior – “You don’t think about how your actions affect the future!” – is entirely correct. Bendis was affectionally critiquing years of X-Men comics, and tying together the larger themes of family and legacy at the center of his X-Men. Everything in the Bendis period comes down to the question of what the X-Men ought to be in the absence of Xavier, and there’s never any tidy answer. Charles Junior, who turns out to be the secret love child of Xavier and Mystique, has valid concerns about what the X-Men do in his father’s name but despite appearances, he’s very much the product of Xavier’s absence. He looks just like his father and is also a powerful psychic, but he lacks his old man’s moral compass and humanitarian vision. He’s much more like his spiteful and manipulative mother. 

There are two sequences in the “One Down” arc that stand out, almost entirely as a result of Immonen’s top-notch artwork. The first is the opening scene of #26, in which the adult Cyclops checks in on the teenage Jean Grey in her quarters. The two characters had mostly avoided one another up until this point in Bendis’ story. It’s very uncomfortable for Cyclops to be in the presence of the teen version of his late wife, and ultra weird for the teen Jean to be around the adult version of the guy she finds out she marries later in life.

Immonen illustrates this scene with remarkable nuance – you hardly even need to read the dialogue to pick up on exactly how the characters feel and are relating to one another. Immonen captures the odd emotional reality of the situation, and the confusing intimacy of their conversation. Cyclops feels an easy rapport with any version of Jean, but is doing everything he can to behave appropriately around her despite his feelings. Jean can’t help but be attracted to him, and admits she prefers the adult Cyclops to his younger self. “It’s like, instead of hoping you’d grow up to become this man, you DID become this man,” she tells him. He does the right thing and pulls away in this moment, and Jean is visibly frustrated.

The second is the extended sequence in #27 in which the future Brotherhood ambush the X-Men in their own home, which at the time is the former Weapon X facility in Canada. Raze, the future son of Mystique and Wolverine, has entered the building under the guise of a wounded X-23, warning about the presence of a shape-shifter. Triage, the X-Men’s young healer, tends to her wounds. “You’re the healer?,” Raze says as he transforms into his true form and slashes his throat. “You first.” Immonen nails the beats of this reveal, and then goes on to perfectly render a sense of claustrophobia and terror as the Brotherhood cut out the power in the facility and start picking off team members. 

Bendis is known for writing to artists’ strengths, and it seems clear that he took note of Immonen’s skill for lighting when deciding to set a key action scene in an underground bunker lit only by creepy pilot lights. Colorist Marte Gracia does great work here too, presenting all of these scenes in a wash of dull red ambiance. A lot of superhero comics suffer for a vagueness of setting, but Immonen and crew keep you in fully aware of physical space in these issues, and it enhances the overall tense and anxious feeling of the story.  

Exit Wounds

“Exit Wounds” / “Mister Sensitive” / 
“And Then There Were Six” / 
“What’s One Life?” / “Snikt!”
X-Force #116-120 (2001)
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Mike Allred

Peter Milligan and Mike Allred were given the job of entirely revamping X-Force around the same time Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely came on New X-Men, as part of a larger radical reinvention of the X-Men line led publisher Bill Jemas and editor-in-chief Joe Quesada in the early 2000s. Whereas Morrison and Quitely’s X-Men held on to core X-characters like Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Grey, Milligan and Allred pretty much only kept the name “X-Force” and created something entirely new on their own. Their X-Force was based on approaching the question of “what if there really were mutants and superheroes?” from a drastically different perspective than anyone done before, with the “Days of Future Past” nihilism replaced with media studies cynicism. 

Milligan and Allred’s X-Force is based on the premise that in the real world, mutants would be celebrities, and superhero teams would be heavily merchandised and motivated primarily by capitalist incentives. The violence they would face in the field would be actually scary and damaging, and members would routinely die horribly on missions. The end of the first issue makes this point quite dramatically, as five out of the eight established members of the team are slaughtered in battle as they attempt to rescue a barely-disguised NSYNC analog. The aftermath of that scene is incredibly gory in a way that deliberately subverts the slick, cartoony look of Allred’s art. X-Force was created by Rob Liefeld to be the more violent and extreme version of X-Men, but had never come close to being as bloody and shocking as Milligan and Allred’s debut.

The first issue establishes the stakes of Milligan and Allred’s story, but more importantly sets up a tone of paranoia and “live fast, die young” hedonism that is central to the series through the end of its first year and into its second phase, when the book is rebranded as X-Statix. There’s a high turnover rate in X-Force/X-Statix membership through the end, which allows Milligan and Allred to play with different celebrity archetypes as they go along. It’s also meant to feel somewhat like a reality TV show, and Milligan deliberately apes that tone when introducing a new batch of members in the second issue. 

Some characters are more “types,” like the intellectual grad student Vivisector, or the out-and-proud token gay Bloke, or emo boy team leader Mister Sensitive. Others are obviously patterned on established celebrities – the closeted b-boy Phat is a thinly veiled Eminem, The Anarchist is basically Dennis Rodman, and U-Go Girl is an amalgam of several troubled starlets but whose given name Edie is a nod to doomed Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. Spike Freeman, the despicable and sadistic venture capitalist creep bankrolling X-Force could be any proto-Silicon Valley bro but is plainly patterned on Liefeld as a meta joke. 

Milligan is a tricky and sometimes frustrating writer whose work is always at least somewhat interesting on a conceptual level but whose quality of execution varies wildly. He can be brilliant or he can be tedious and it all mostly depends on how excited he is about an idea in the moment. When he’s at his best, as in Shade the Changing Man, Human Target, and X-Force, his writing feels wired and hyperactive, as though he’s improvising and free-associating from page to page. But even his best work tends to taper off as that buzz wears off, and he sticks around on series a bit longer than he probably should, and that absolutely was the case about midway through X-Statix. It’s always pretty clear when he’s just clocking in, but as a professional writer myself, I totally get it. It’s a living. The weakest Milligan work is still a lot more imaginative and charming than most other mainstream comics writers, and his consistent obsession with identity – as both a fixed and fluid thing – has always been well ahead of his time. 

Milligan is fully in the zone in his first year of X-Force, especially in the first run of issues at the start where he and Allred are really popping off with genuinely fresh ideas for X-Men comics. You can sense their giddy joy at what they’re getting away with – the jokes, the commentary, the sex, the gore. It’s mostly arch and cynical, but there’s some heart to it, mainly in the creators’ obvious affection for U-Go Girl in particular. She’s never presented as “likeable” but she’s easy to love in all her ambitious pettiness and glamourous messiness. When she dies at the end of the first year, it’s a “kill your darlings” move that removes the heart and soul of the series. Subsequent female leads are never quite as interesting, and of the other major characters, only The Anarchist is anywhere near as compelling. 

X-Force/X-Statix is very rooted in early 2000s pop culture but it’s remarkable how well this all holds up. If anything has changed, the world has only become more like this series, and social media has given us an endless wave of disposable pop culture mutants. Clearly the creators themselves feel this way, as midway through writing this post a new iteration of this series by Milligan and Allred called The X-Cellent has been announced for release in 2020. Should be interesting to see if they have an interesting take on mutants in the Instagram era. 

Final Execution

“Final Execution”
Uncanny X-Force #31-35 (2012-2013)
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Phil Noto

Most fiction writers have a theme they work through in a majority of their work, and for Rick Remender it’s unbreakable cycles of violence. Remender’s run on Uncanny X-Force, which I would say is the best X-Men story to ever be published as a spin-off title, is a meditation on how violence only begets more violence, and that the notion of “redemptive violence” is just a rationalization. This is a very subversive but totally appropriate story to tell in the context of X-Force, the X-title that was conceived as a hyper-violent “proactive” form of super-team and had fully transformed into a clandestine “black ops” kill squad in the Craig Kyle/Chris Yost run just prior to Remender’s tenure. Kyle and Yost also wrestled with their characters facing trauma and moral rot in their stories, but it was still pretty clear that the primary point of their X-Force was “wow, these baddies are SO BAD, they DESERVE to die.” Their run was conceived during the George W. Bush administration and it’s very much an artefact of that era and the “War on Terrror.” 

Remender began his Uncanny X-Force with a despicable act of “proactive” violence – Fantomex murdering a child clone of Apocalypse in cold blood – and every story that came after that initial arc came out of unexpected consequences of that action. The entire run, which concluded in the extended “Final Execution” arc, is a critique of the very concept of X-Force. The core characters – Wolverine, Psylocke, Archangel, Fantomex, and Deadpool – are all poisoned by their cruelty and unjustifiable killing, and two of them die as a result of their actions. Remender’s cast are all characters who have had their bodies transformed against their will to become weapons for someone else’s use, and in the case of Fantomex, he was born and raised in an artificial environment to be a killer. They all want to act of their free will after having that taken away from them at some point, but can’t extricate “living weapon” from their identities. It’s “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” but these people have adamantium claws, psychic knives, razor wings, and a LOT of guns. 

Psylocke is at the center of most of Remender’s stories because she’s the character with the most moral conflict over what they’re doing and the greatest self-delusion about what she has become. She’s the reader surrogate in some ways – initially on the side of X-Force but increasingly aware that they’ve been kidding themselves all along. At the start of the second phase of “Final Execution,” which is illustrated by the subtle but rather stylish Phil Noto, Psylocke has lost both of her love interests – she was forced to kill Archangel when he was corrupted by Apocalypse’s cult, and Fantomex was executed by the sadistic Skinless Man shortly after he and Psylocke finally consummated their lust/hate dynamic after she’d hit rock bottom emotionally.  She’s a broken person, but she knows why. She just wants to get out of the cycle.

Psylocke’s relationship with Archangel was established in the early ‘90s by Fabian Nicieza in X-Men. It was an inspired match – they’re both from posh backgrounds, but had experienced similar physical transformations against their will. They had similar angst, but also shared a hedonistic streak. Remender’s pairing of Psylocke and Fantomex is similarly brilliant, but for darker reasons. Shortly after the two hook up, Psylocke cruelly dismisses Fantomex by telling him that he is a “living contrivance, a product… a hall of mirrors with no end” and that “there is no YOU to have feelings for.” She’s not wrong about this, but it’s also apparent that she recognizes this because she sees herself in him, or perhaps more accurately, what she fears she has become after the trauma of having her mind and body tampered with so many times over. Fantomex wants Psylocke because she is who he wants to be, and Psylocke lusts for Fantomex because he’s given in entirely to the absurdity and brutality of his nature. 

“Final Execution” is necessarily bleak in the resolution of its primary character arcs. There is some minor joy in Deadpool embracing his best impulses and serving as a demented sort of father figure to the second child Apocalypse, but Wolverine’s storyline ends with an act so horrible it shatters his illusions about trying to be a father figure/role model to the youngest generation of mutants. He knows he’s nothing but a hypocrite, and he’s doomed to live in a constant cycle of violence that will always result in the deaths of people he loves. Wolverine and Deadpool can’t change – the market demands nonstop bloodshed from the both of them, and so the reader is complicit in this terrible loop of misery and destruction. The readership has an endless desire for redemptive violence, and Remender is at least doing his best to show them that it’s a false premise. He’s been doing the same story with different characters in Deadly Class for the past few years, and you can tell he only gets more weary and cynical about this as he goes along.

Uncanny X-Force does end with a “happy ending” of sorts in its epilogue. Fantomex returns to life, but as three clones – he originally had three separate brains, but an error in the cloning made a body for each clone. The darkest aspects of his persona ended up in one body, and his kindest aspects were isolated in a female version of himself. In the end, the primary Fantomex takes Psylocke to meet his “mother,” a fictional construct who raised him in “The World,” the articificial reality where he was created. Psylocke questions the reality of the situation, and Fantomex essentially just shrugs it off. Does it matter? Can they just be happy, even if it’s fake? After all the chaos and pain and death, the only reasonable thing either of them can do in the end is embrace a happy fantasy. Sometimes the only escape is delusion and oblivion. 

Supernovas

“Supernovas”
X-Men #188-193 (2007)
Written by Mike Carey
Pencils by Chris Bachalo (188-190, 192-193) and Clayton Henry (191)
Inks by Tim Townshend et al (188-190, 192-193) and Mark Morales (191)

Mike Carey is one of the most prolific X-Men writers, having written 72 issues of X-Men and the original graphic novel X-Men: No More Humans. In that span of time he was a primary author of two major crossovers, “Messiah Complex” and “Second Coming,” and the sole author of the “Age of X” event. His tenure is easily overlooked, mainly because he’s never at any point the main writer on the franchise. His run begins as a relaunch alongside Ed Brubaker’s Uncanny X-Men while Joss Whedon and John Cassaday slowly published the second half of their best-selling Astonishing X-Men series. After “Messiah Complex,” his book – long the co-flagship of the line – is retitled X-Men: Legacy and becomes a Charles Xavier solo title. Once that story runs its course, it shifts into a Rogue solo series. These periods have their moments, but it’s mostly a lot of inconsequential stories that are often mired in a lot of continuity baggage. Carey not having a set team of characters to work with freed him to follow his muse and go deep on Xavier, Rogue, and Magneto, but also damned his book to seem very much like an extra X-Men title published for die-hard completists rather than an essential series. 

Carey started very strong though. “Supernovas,” his opening arc, is a showcase for his focus on thoughtful character beats, hard science fiction, and deep-cut X-lore. The story follows Rogue as she’s tasked by Cyclops with creating her own team to specialize in responding to crises while a lot of the other X-Men are either focused on running the school or off in outer space. Rogue is a deeply strange character to be given a leadership role, and that’s a lot of the point here. She’s a veteran, sure, but she tends to be a reckless loose cannon. Cyclops chooses to see her chaotic tactics as “inspired improvisation” in Carey’s first issue, and the remainder of his initial run up through “Messiah Complex” is essentially a referendum on the pros and cons of Rogue’s approach to leading a team. 

Generally speaking, it does not go well for her, pretty much from the start. Rogue’s team is a ragtag assortment of characters, some of whom are close friends – Cannonball, Iceman – but the rest are mostly antagonists she needs to keep on a tight leash – Mystique, Sabretooth, Lady Mastermind – or random people who just happen to be on hand, like Cable and Omega Sentinel. It’s more of a cast than a team, but Rogue tries to hold them together as much as she can despite half the characters actively working against her goals. 

Carey’s selection of characters set up a lot of good drama, but also highlight his intriguing approach to the very concept of a “team book.” He’s essentially making lemonade out of lemons – he didn’t have the option to have a more standard X-Men team, so he instead assembled an unlikely group of characters who are set up to fail. Most superhero team stories are built on a fantasy of people working together in harmony, but Carey is curious about what happens when that’s not an option.

The story also plays on one of the central themes of Rogue’s overall character arc – she is a reformed villain who became an X-Man after a brief stint in her foster mother Mystique’s Brotherhood as a teenager. She’s invested a lot in the idea of redemption, but is aware that it’s a bit too much to expect of a sociopath like Mystique and a full-on psychopath like Sabretooth. Over the course of this run, Carey asks the reader to be as optimistic as Rogue is trying to be about all this, but in the end he’s quite honest about the nature of the characters he’s working with. Rogue’s haphazard team-building only leads to betrayal and failure, and while that’s not entirely her fault, it very much is a story about how not everyone is cut out for leadership. 

“Supernovas” is mostly illustrated by Chris Bachalo at one of his creative peaks. Bachalo’s work is highly distinctive but also constantly mutating, and this story comes at an intriguing point in his evolution where he’s increasingly drawing with color in mind and sometimes coloring his own pages. (The remainder is colored by Christina Strain and Antonio Fabela, who turn in some lovely work.) Bachalo has gone through some phases of strange, cluttered page designs but at this point he’s loosened up quite a bit and allows for a lot more negative space to be filled by ambient colors. One of his best narrative tricks for big dramatic moments here is to drop out backgrounds entirely in favor of large expanses of white space on the page, such as the aftermath of one of Rogue’s risky moves in the first issue, or a particularly creepy page in which a brainwashed Northstar appears before his suicidal twin sister Aurora in the second issue. 

Bachalo did not draw the fourth issue of this storyline, likely due to scheduling problems. This is to be expected with monthly superhero comics, but this is a case where having a fill-in artist totally wrecks the specific atmosphere and aesthetic of the primary storytellers. Clayton Henry isn’t a bad artist but his bland traditionalism is jarring and breaks the spell of Bachalo’s designs. The switch to his pages is roughly equivalent to watching a Star Wars movie in which all of the cast is inexplicably replaced by soap opera actors and all of the production values drop to student film level for 20 minutes before going back to normal for the last 40 minutes of the picture.

Henry’s art disrupts the mood and drama, and his drab and unimaginative style actively undermines Bachalo’s designs for the story’s antagonists, the Children of the Vault. This group of characters, who were created by Bachalo and Carey, are not mutants but instead the result of the standard human genome being artificially evolved over a period of 6,000 years in a temporal accelerator. Carey was exploring the evolutionary biology concept for genetic drift and Bachalo was having fun with a set of characters who are meant to seem even more eerie and inhuman than the mutants. Henry’s interpretation follows Bachalo’s designs but makes them all look rather…literal. In context, it all just looks like bad homemade costumes, with all the visual poetry of Bachalo’s art removed. This problem of translating Bachalo’s work to other artistic styles probably explains a lot of why these characters have rarely been seen again outside of a follow-up storyline by Carey late in his tenure.

We Call the Ship Blobsy

“The Butterfly Effect Begins” / “We Call the Ship Blobsy” 
X-Tremists #2-3 (2019)
Written by Leah Williams
Pencils by Georges Jeanty
Inks by Roberto Poggi

X-Tremists is a mini-series that is part of a larger story called “Age of X-Man” which was devised as an event to be published in the interim period before Jonathan Hickman’s arrival as the new principle writer of X-Men comics this July. It is a sideways version of “Age of Apocalypse” in which X-Man – an immensely powerful clone created by the “Age of Apocalypse” version of Mister Sinister from Cyclops and Jean Grey’s genetic material and who is essentially that dystopia’s equivalent to Cable – forces the majority of notable X-Men characters to be shunted into his bizarre version of a utopia. X-Man’s world is peaceful, and a place where only mutants exist. But because X-Man is so essentially warped by his origin as a clone, he’s decided that all physical, romantic, and familial relationships are inherently bad and obsolete in a world where all new children are created in labs. 

As with “Age of Apocalypse,” the story plays out in a set of mini-series that explore different facets of this new alternate reality. The tension in each series mainly comes down to characters slowly realizing something about their existence is off, and experiencing flashes of their true lives. Most of the series involved are pleasantly mediocre and mostly suffer because their premise is overextended in five issues and the art is drab and uninspired. The best of the series by quite some distance is X-Tremists, which is written by newcomer Leah Williams and illustrated by Georges Jeanty, who previously collaborated with Joss Whedon on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book. 

The title is very misleading in that there is no group of characters called X-Tremists, and the series is actually about the agents of Department X, who are tasked with enforcing X-Man’s draconian laws forbidding any sort of sex and romance. Unlike a lot of contemporary X-Men titles, in which the selection of cast members seems somewhat arbitrary, Williams was very deliberate about the characters selected for her story. Three of the main characters – Iceman, Northstar, and Psylocke – are canonically queer, and have been essentially forced back into the closet by X-Man. Jubilee is a young mother, and has had all her memories of her son erased from her mind. 

And then there’s Blob. Blob has been written as a villain all through his publishing history, and has always been presented as a vile, pathetic fat man who only ever works as a henchman for either Magneto or Mystique. Unlike the other characters, who have had something important about themselves taken away by X-Man, the Blob of this world has been given a much better life in which he can actually be his true self. In a world where being unique is celebrated and all sorts of body types are acceptable, he’s no longer forced into villainy by society’s disgust for his obese form. He’s allowed to be a proud and upstanding citizen. In this context, he’s widely respected as a hero and a leader. He’s well-read and thoughtful. Despite the creepiness of Department X’s mission, he’s a gentle and forgiving pacifist.

And he’s in love with Psylocke. But unlike in the real world, where his self-hatred and a justified assumption that everyone finds him repulsive would lead him to repress a crush like this, he’s kept this to himself here because of the laws he’s expected to enforce. Blob is pushed to reveal this to Psylocke in the second issue in a tearful and often poetic monologue. Blob’s confession is very considerate in a self-loathing sort of way – he makes a point up front about how he never intended to “impose” his feelings on her and was content to keep it to himself – but he refuses to apologize for having those feelings in the first place because allowing himself to love her was something that made him feel alive.

The big surprise for Blob, and for the reader as well, is that Psylocke is not repulsed by him. In the third issue she returns to his home to have tea and borrow some of his favorite books, and she ends up having her own soliloquy about her complicated and painful relationship with her body. The version of Psylocke in this story is the current iteration, who just recently was returned to her original form as a posh British woman after having inhabited the form of an Asian ninja for nearly three decades of publishing. Williams’ Psylocke has been dealing with dysmorphia and an eating disorder since she was a teenager, and being trapped in another woman’s body was a respite from all this. “I never felt that way toward Kwannon’s body, only mine,” she tells Blob. “It was so much easier to be kinder to myself through her body. I did not struggle with my eating disorder when I looked like her. Because she is not me, and she IS beautiful.” 

Blob and Psylocke don’t consummate their feelings, and continue to follow the laws they enforce. But the intimacy they’ve developed is profound for both, and carries into how they interact in the remainder of the story. It’s sad in the sense that poor Blob’s deep love is unrequited, but quite beautiful in how they open up to one another. It would be awful if future writers don’t run with what Williams establishes about Blob’s true nature, or how she articulates Psylocke’s fraught relationship with her original body. It certainly makes the most of the editorial decision to revert Psylocke from her far more iconic (though racially problematic) form. 

Williams is young and relatively new to writing comics, and comes to the industry after some success as a YA novelist. Her perspective is fresh and her fandom for the X-Men in particular is quite intense. The difference between her approach to this series – as well as recent one-shots she wrote focused on Emma Frost and Magik – and that of most anyone else who has written X-Men comics in the past few years is quite stark. For one, the tight focus on a set of five carefully selected core characters and diving deep into their major themes and inner lives is the opposite of some of the other “Age of X-Man” series or, say, how Matthew Rosenberg has been writing the concurrently published Uncanny X-Men series, which follows the characters who were not zapped into X-Man’s alternate world. 

Rosenberg’s Uncanny is a fascinating mess that began with great promise as he focused on the return of Cyclops and Wolverine but quickly devolved into a narrative trainwreck as his core cast bloated to over a dozen members, and each successive issue was packed with yet more characters popping in from out of nowhere in glorified cameos. Rosenberg is hardly alone in the “all-you-can-eat-buffet” approach to casting X-Men comics, but his recent work is the most egregious example yet. It is all too transparent that when given the opportunity to write a 12-issue X-Men run, he decided to prioritize packing in as many characters he liked as possible without, you know, actually giving those characters any meaningful story beats. The plot is rushed and often nearly incoherent, and moments that ought to have landed as emotional and tragic, such as the pointless killing of Wolfsbane, don’t connect at all. (The latter in large part due to the slapdash art of a rando fill-in penciler.) 

It isn’t just that Williams is sensible in her narrative choices, but that unlike the majority of people writing these things these days she actually has something to say. She’s working through her own lived-in experiences with body issues and queer identity, and pushing themes that have been in the subtext of X-Men comics for decades to the surface. She writes her characters as people, not just IP to trot out joylessly, or a box of action figures to haphazardly spill out on to the living room floor. She loves the characters she writes, and badly wants you to empathize with them and connect like she has. The bar in comics is very low now, and writers really can just nod in the direction of woke ideas and expect rapturous applause from small pockets of fans on social media. But Williams goes deeper, and there’s a heart and generosity to her writing that was crucial to Chris Claremont and Scott Lobdell’s work on the franchise at its commercial peak in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A lot of writers have certainly attempted to bring that back, but Williams does it effortlessly because this is clearly just the sort of person she is. 

Lifedeath

“Lifedeath”
Uncanny X-Men #186 (1984)
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Barry Windsor-Smith

It’s pretty obvious that Storm was Chris Claremont’s favorite character. She, along with Wolverine, is the consistent center of the cast through his original 17-year run, and the character he gives the richest and most complex inner life. Claremont’s Storm is a woman of many contradictions – goddess and street urchin, compassionate idealist and ruthless revolutionary, leader and rebel. She’s proud and has an incredibly strong will, and most stories that focus on her are about an antagonist attempting – an ultimately failing – to dominate and control her. 

Storm’s original role in the X-Men leaned mostly on her “goddess” role. She was mostly a noble and serene presence – more emotional and instinctive in her leadership than the more cerebral and meticulously strategic Cyclops, more exotic and unknowable than her “girl next door” best friend Jean Grey, and connected to the natural world in a far more beautiful and spiritual way than the brutal and bestial Wolverine. Storm’s story becomes more complicated and interesting during Paul Smith’s run as artist in 1982 starting with her taking control of the underground society of mutant outcasts called the Morlocks after defeating their butch Patti Smith-esque punk leader Callisto in a knife fight, and having a brief lesbian fling with the Japanese thief Yukio while the X-Men are in Tokyo. (That’s not explicitly stated in the text, by the way, but come on.) She debuts her classic mohawk look at the end of that story, giving herself a punk makeover to reflect her emerging wild side. 

Storm was directly inspired to embrace the new look by interacting with Yukio and realizing how much she wanted to be like her. “I envy you your madness, Yukio,” she says in Uncanny #172. “It is a luxury denied me ever since my powers first appeared. My safety, and that of those around me, requires an inner serenity – an absolute harmony with the world itself – I have lost lately.” At this point in the story, Storm is learning to embrace her emotions and trust that her instincts will keep her from unleashing major ecological collateral damage. 

Over the next dozen or so issues, Storm struggles with this and with how other characters respond to her emotional growth. Kitty Pryde, always a harshly judgmental figure in X-lore, is particularly hard on Storm for having the nerve to be something other than the calm maternal figure she had come to love. In Uncanny #180, Storm confronts Kitty and addresses this conflict, with the adolescent Kitty countering Storm’s need to grow and change by petulantly declaring “Some things shouldn’t change, they should be constant!” Kitty comes around to accepting Storm’s tearful explanation of her adult need to find her true self and in doing so learn things about herself she might not like. Storm’s speech to Kitty in this issue reads a lot like someone explaining why they had to come out of the closet. 

All of this is setting the table for Uncanny #186, a special issue illustrated by guest artist Barry Windsor-Smith in which Storm deals with the immediate aftermath of losing her elemental powers and sense of sense of self. After making progress in her quest to balance her emotions and powers, the rug is pulled out from under her when she’s accidentally hit with a shot from a gun that neutralizes mutant powers that was intended for the fugitive Rogue. In this story, “Lifedeath,” she’s recovering in the home of the mutant inventor Forge, who she does not realize is the man who, on behalf of the U.S. government, created the weapon that robbed her of her gifts. 

“Lifedeath” is subtitled “a love story” on the cover of the issue, and is a very peculiar sort of romance. The majority of the issue is about Storm and Forge getting to know each other while she processes her trauma and is forced to reassess everything she thought she understood about herself. Forge is extremely attracted to her from the start, and she develops a crush on him over the course of the issue. He’s presented as intelligent, philosophical, and somewhat debonair, and lives in an elaborate high rise tricked out with incredible inventions – the most remarkable being a sort of holographic imaging that the can make structural elements appear invisible so furniture and bodies resting on them look as if they’re floating mid-air. 

The two begin to bond when Storm learns that Forge has endured serious trauma in his life and that he lost his right leg in an explosion while serving as a soldier in Vietnam. Over the course of a romantic dinner, she reveals to him that her severe claustrophobia is a result of having to watch her mother die while they were both trapped under rubble from a bomb that leveled their home when she was a small child in Cairo. Neither of them is used to this sort of intimacy, so the intensity of the situation is especially strong. They come close to consummating their attraction to one another, but are interrupted by a call – an in listening in, Storm learns of Forge’s complicity in her loss. Windsor-Smith, one of comics’ greatest draftsmen, nails every emotional beat with exquisite nuance.

Forge attempts to explain himself. He was just following orders and doing his job, of course! When he reveals to Storm that he is also a mutant, it only makes her more disgusted, as it’s clear just how much of a sell-out he is. Storm tells him off in rather brutal terms at the climax of the issue – “You live in your high tower – untouched, untouchable – surrounded by illusion, so terrified of the real, living world you cannot bear to violate the sanctity of your space with something as small as a flower. Your home is a true reflection of its creator: Cold, cruel, sterile, and ultimately, a deception.” Forge gets defensive, but it’s a waste of his time. Storm has, at least for now, made up her mind about him.

This is only the beginning of the Storm and Forge story, which would carry on and off through the next few years of Claremont’s run without ever coalescing into any sort of proper romantic partnership. Forge is Storm’s first major love interest, and for a very long time the only notable romantic pairing in her publication history. (She would eventually be in written into a brief and largely miserable marriage with Black Panther, another cold and emotionally stunted inventor/genius type.)

Forge is a very inspired romantic foil for Storm – it’s very easy to understand the reasons she would be attracted to him, but the intersection of his power and personality make him a potent metaphor for a particular sort of disappointing man. He has the power to create literally anything he can imagine, but he’s so damaged and lacking in imagination that he mostly squanders his gifts on flashy home decor and creating weapons. Storm is correct – his need to isolate himself makes him quite selfish, and that keeps him from doing real good for the world. He eventually becomes a member of the X-Men, but he never fulfills his potential in that capacity either. One way or another, he always reverts to form as an aloof government stooge who mostly just builds weapons that inflict the same sort of damage unto others as he experienced in Vietnam. 

Everything Is Sinister

“Everything Is Sinister”
Uncanny X-Men Vol 2 #1-3 (2012)
Written by Kieron Gillen
Pencils by Carlos Pacheco with Jorge Molina, Rodney Buchemi, and Paco Diaz

By the time Kieron Gillen got the opportunity to write Mister Sinister, the character was firmly established as one of the most prominent X-Men antagonists, but also one of the most confusing. Sinister, who was originally introduced by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri as the mysterious new archvillain of the X-Men following the rehabilitation of Magneto, was never given a concrete backstory during Claremont’s original tenure on the series. He’s responsible for sending his Marauders to murder the Morlocks in the “Mutant Massacre,” but we never find out why until a retcon a decade after that story was published. In “Inferno” he’s revealed to be the mastermind behind the creation of the Jean Grey clone Madelyne Pryor in an elaborate scheme to mate Jean’s genetic potential with that of Cyclops’ despite Jean’s seeming death at the time he set the plan in motion. Claremont’s Sinister isn’t a character so much as a plot driver, and given his assumption that he would be writing X-Men indefinitely, there’s a sense that he was going to get around to the origin and motivations of Sinister at some point in the ‘90s. 

Claremont set the basic template for Mister Sinister – master manipulator, mad scientist, obsessed with cloning, and knowingly camp in his villainy. Silvestri’s brilliant original design for the character looked like Colossus as a goth glam rocker. Later writers built on this with retcons, most notably that he was not actually a mutant but a Victorian scientist named Nathaniel Essex who was genetically enhanced by Apocalypse. Fabian Nicieza deepened Sinister’s obsession with Cyclops’ family line, but also cemented the trope that Sinister is always plotting something but mostly just taunts the X-Men rather than do anything actually scary. Writers just kept giving Sinister more powers too, to the point where it just seemed like he was borderline omnipotent. (But yet, always so easily defeated?)

Kieron Gillen took it upon himself to take everything previous writers had done with Sinister and not just make sense of it all but position him as a thematically logical archnemesis for the X-Men. He doesn’t contradict anything important about the character – he’s an amoral Victorian dandy mad scientist obsessed with mutants – but he revealed what he’s been working towards all this time. Basically, he’s been tinkering with mutant genes and cloning all this time to turn himself into a hive mind species. It’s the ultimate expression of egomania – he wants to replace both humans and mutants on earth with endless iterations of himself in a distinctly British version of a fascist utopia. It’s “God made us in His image” taken very literally by someone with the means to be like “Oh, I can do that too.” 

Gillen had finally made sense of Sinister’s motivation, but the real fun is in how he wrote his dialogue. The character had always been written as a pompous megalomaniac prone to monologues and melodramatic gestures, but Gillen really leaned into it and emphasized that when it comes down to it, he’s just a messy bitch who lives for drama. It’s all a big game to him, and he loves playing the villain. He chose the name Mister Sinister!  Gillen writes Sinister as a demented sort of artist, and playing the part of over-the-top scenery-chewing supervillain is a deliberate part of his persona. He’s not about dogma or nobility like Apocalypse or Magneto – for him it’s just ego, a barely-concealed erotic obsession with Cyclops and Jean Grey, and a perverse sense of fun.

A large portion of “Everything Is Sinister” is basically Mister Sinister doing a classic “villain explains his evil plot to the heroes” monologue, and he’s loving every moment of it. He actually mentions on panel that he’s been dying to tell the X-Men – and specifically Cyclops – all about it for a very long time. It’s a performance, and he knows that this particular story is just a dress rehearsal for a bigger arc later on in Gillen’s run. When Sinister taunts Cyclops at the end of this arc – “Next time we talk, you’ll be more hated than I’ve ever been” – he’s absolutely correct, which would imply that Sinister is a something of a metatextual character. He knows what Gillen knows about editorial plans, but the other characters are on the same page as the reader. 

Gillen’s version of Mister Sinister has become the dominant iteration of the character since this story was published, but some writers have done better with this than others. Jonathan Hickman used a version of Sinister in Secret Wars to great effect, pushing him even further into bitchy camp. (Hickman loves writing a petty elitist, so of course he’d gravitate to the Gillen Sinister.)

But still, this hasn’t stopped writers like Jeff Lemire, Cullen Bunn, and Matthew Rosenberg from writing Mister Sinister more recently as a gloating chump, and essentially as a “mini-boss” in their larger narratives. Of course, part of the beauty of Gillen’s conception of the character is that it makes sense of the existence of off-model Sinisters showing up in lesser comics. He’s basically given the Mister Sinister the canonical equivalent of Doctor Doom’s Doombot doubles. (“Oh, that wasn’t the true Doom, that was just a Doombot” has been a way for writers to retcon previous stories they dislike since John Byrne wrote Fantastic Four in the ‘80s.) 

Of course, given that Hickman is now in charge of the X-Men mythos going forward and is an avowed fan of Gillen’s concept for Mister Sinister, it can be taken as a given that there won’t be any dull or wasted uses of the character for at least a few years to come. The future, as the character is wont to say, is distinctly Sinister. 

Third Genesis

“Third Genesis” / “Searching” / “Dead Silence” /
“Between the Cracks” / “Don’t Touch That Dial!”
/ “Notes From the Underground”
Generation X #1-6 (1995-1996)
Written by Scott Lobdell
Pencils by Chris Bachalo
Inks by Mark Pennington

Generation X, much like its namesake cohort, is a strange middle-child in the X-Men franchise that never quite got enough space to fully grow and thrive, and is largely overshadowed by school-centric X-books that came before and after it. The comic seems to move in fits and starts without building to any defining storyline, and the series loses direction and identity once its creators Scott Lobdell and Chris Bachalo depart. The characters created for the series – Husk, Monet, Chamber, Skin, and Synch – have rarely been used to their full potential since the book ended, and the latter two were killed off years ago and have never returned. (Which is fine, more characters ought to stay dead, but it wouldn’t ever hurt to have more black and Latino characters around.) The series’ greatest legacy is that it marks the first use of Emma Frost primarily as a heroic character. 

The biggest reason why the classic Generation X issues work is also the reason later issues and other interpretations of the characters have failed: This series is VERY MUCH about the synergy of  Bachalo’s highly distinctive art style and Lobdell’s sardonic wit and skill for writing low-key character development. Everything that is appealing about the characters and the stories comes down to these two guys being allowed to indulge in their quirks. It’s in the character and page design, it’s in the way Lobdell is clearly a lot more interested in writing scenes where characters get to know each other over a game of Scrabble or a field trip to Manhattan than typical superhero conflicts. Even those are unusual, and mostly focused on Monet’s creepy quasi-vampiric brother Emplate and her odd connection to the mute enigma called Penance. 

Much in the same way Warlock never looks quite right when illustrated by anyone but Bill Sienkiewicz, it’s hard to translate the burst of light that Chamber has where his chest and lower jaw ought to be outside of Bachalo’s style. It looks awful when rendered with a more photorealistic aesthetic, and the sad poetry of his form is lost if it’s drawn with a more standard superhero look. Bachalo and Lobdell nail something very potent with Chamber. Lobdell took Bachalo’s design of a boy with flaming hole in his chest and made the implicit metaphor the basis of the character – he’s a sad, lonely, self-pitying kid whose damage is on permanent display. 

He’s a literal flame, and Paige “Husk” Guthrie is the proverbial moth. Paige is the younger sister of Cannonball, one of the leads of the original X-Men spin-off school series New Mutants. At this point in time, Cannonball had “graduated” to become a full member of the X-Men. Husk is presented as a classic Type A person – an obsessively focused student, the type of kid who gets up at the crack of dawn and goes out for a five-mile run – and extremely eager to follow in the footsteps of her brother as an X-Man. She’s basically the Rory Gilmore of Generation X, and Chamber is her Jess Mariano. (Angela Chase wasn’t a great student, so a comparison to the roughly contemporaneous My So-Called Life doesn’t quite work, sorry.) 

Paige’s power is a metaphor for her personality too. She can induce metamorphoses by literally tearing off her skin. She never knows what her next form will take, but she always reverts back to her primary form as what Lobdell describes as “a doe-eyed blonde fresh from her native Kentucky home.” Unlike Chamber, who has to wrap himself up in layers of scarves to venture out into the world, she can choose to pass as normal, but is often a grotesque freak. The body-shedding thing understandably grosses people out. She starts off as the seemingly normal girl who’s quite odd and interesting below the surface, but grows into the girl who’s always finding something in herself that she didn’t realize was there. 

Husk spends the first few issues of Generation X fascinated by Chamber, and surprised as she learns that he’s not always a brooding dick, but actually a very sweet and generous person when left to his own devices. They bond in the fifth issue, shortly after Husk learns about the Legacy virus, a thinly veiled mutant analog to HIV and AIDS. He finds her drunk off of one beer, utterly despondent because she can’t help but think that all her hard work and promise as a mutant might not mean much if she catches this disease and dies before she’s even out of her teens. Lobdell and Bachalo manage a delicate balance in this scene – it’s funny, it’s cute, it’s depressing, it’s romantic. The scene conveys a moment of intimacy and connection, but Lobdell shows that these two aren’t quite on the same page. As she informs him that life is unfair – “with a capital UN” – he gazes off into a mirror at what remains of his face. “Tell me about it, Paige.” 

Torn

“Torn (part 2)” 
Astonishing X-Men #14 (2006)
Written by Joss Whedon
Art by John Cassaday

I am not a fandom-y person, and don’t really go in for “shipping” and all that. It’s just not how I’ve ever engaged with fiction. That said, if I have an OTP – “one true pairing” – in all of fiction, it’s Scott Summers and Emma Frost. It’s not because I want to be either of them, or that I fancy them, or that I think it’s a particularly romantic pairing. It’s more just that there is something about the combination of these characters that rings very true to me. 

It makes a lot of sense to me that Cyclops, after falling out of love with Jean Grey, would gravitate to someone who could offer the same telepathic radical transparency but without Jean’s idealism. Both Jean and Emma can see him for exactly who he is, but whereas Jean judges him for his weaknesses, Emma accepts him as he is. She finds him interesting and wants to help him be the man he yearns to be. That gives him permission to be vulnerable. He’s exhausted by having to always live up to Jean’s example and expectations. 

It makes sense that Emma Frost would be attracted to a man with his power, ambition, and nobility. Emma is innately drawn to status, but also to puzzles and broken things. She is a domme, and likes to assert power and influence over him. But just as she gives him the freedom to let down his guard and be something else, he’s accepting of her desire to follow a more noble calling with the X-Men rather than with the Hellfire Club. While other X-Men doubt her motives and morality, Scott takes her at her word and gives her his full respect and admiration. 

They found each other at the perfect crossroads in their lives, where she was ready to be “good” and he was finally willing to loosen up and be a bit “bad.” Over the course of their relationship – which in publishing time runs from around 2002 up through 2014, mostly told in stories written by Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon, Matt Fraction, Kieron Gillen, and Brian Michael Bendis – they bring out the best and worst in each other. There’s something very honest about this love story, and how it begins and ends in very messy ways. 

While Grant Morrison established the Scott and Emma romance in New X-Men, it was Joss Whedon who fully developed it during his run on Astonishing X-Men with artist John Cassaday. Whedon’s story picks up where Morrison left off, with Scott and Emma officially together shortly after Jean Grey’s latest death. Morrison only ever wrote Scott and Emma’s romance as an illicit psychic affair, but Whedon gets to explore the dynamics of them as an actual couple. He’s the one who establishes them as partners in leadership, to the chagrin of most of the other X-Men – Scott defers to Emma in many decisions, and this is where her ruthlessness starts to seep into his own attitude. This is the beginning of his gradual political radicalization. 

Whedon fully dives into the Scott and Emma relationship in Astonishing X-Men #14, the second part of the “Torn” story arc. This issue is primarily focused on a confrontation between the two of them that echoes the sort of “psychic therapy” she gave to him during the Morrison run, but with a more aggressive “tough love” bent. Emma starts by prodding at his weak spots – his idealistic love for Jean, his envy of Wolverine’s macho charisma, his insecurity over his position as the leader of the X-Men – but he resists that approach. He’s aware of all that, he’s done the work to move on. But she’s really just softening him up so he can get to his darkest secret, a repressed memory of him as an adolescent deciding that the only way for him to have full responsibility his devastating eye-blasts would be to make sure he couldn’t control them and had a failsafe in the form of his visor. At the end of the issue, Emma gives him the control he’s denied himself, but in doing so effectively cuts off his access to the power altogether. It’s hard to tell whether she’s being cruel or kind, even if she’s only doing this as a pawn of the demented psychic being Cassandra Nova. It’s both. 

This plot could set in motion the end of their relationship, but it only makes them stronger. Whedon’s removal of Cyclops’ power echoes what Chris Claremont did with Storm in the ’80s, and uses it as an opportunity for him to prove his mettle and leadership skills without relying on the brute force of his mutant gifts. The power returns in time, and along with it his inability to control it, but Scott interprets what Emma did for him as a gift. He wants someone who will call out his weaknesses and illusions, he wants someone who will help him become a better person. It’s all he ever wants, really – he’s always been written as myopic and obsessed with being the best he can be. And Emma, a curious combination of dominatrix and school teacher from the start, has always been someone who wants to break someone down to build them up. Whedon saw what had been on the page for years and took it to a logical, if not entirely romantic, conclusion.

Capital Crimes

“Capital Crimes”
Uncanny X-Men #272 (1990)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by Jim Lee
Inks by Scott Williams

“Capital Crimes” is the seventh issue of the nine-part “X-Tinction Agenda” storyline that ran through Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants in the fall of 1990. It’s a very frustrating story in that the Uncanny X-Men issues, written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Jim Lee at the pinnacle of their talents, are as exciting and visually thrilling as superhero comics get, while the remainder of the story is largely incoherent and unattractive. Louise Simonson, who wrote the New Mutants and X-Factor issues, doesn’t seem especially inspired but is as at a massive disadvantage in that her artists are nowhere near as exciting as Jim Lee. Two of her three New Mutants issues are illustrated by a young Rob Liefeld who is obviously scrambling to meet deadlines while inkers like Joe Rubinstein wipe out nearly all traces of his ridiculous charm, leaving only messy, ugly pages. (The third is drawn by a total rando doing a fill-in issue.) Her X-Factor issues are illustrated by Jon Bogdanove, who would be fine enough in other contexts but whose lumpy linework looks extremely drab and old-fashioned in contrast with Lee’s dynamic and densely rendered pages. Flipping through a collection of “X-Tinction Agenda” today is jarring, but does adequately emphasize how original and exciting Lee’s art was at the time. It’s somewhat comparable to the roughly concurrent seismic impact that Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks, N.W.A., and Nirvana had on their respective genres in music. 

At the time of “X-Tinction Agenda,” Chris Claremont had been writing Uncanny X-Men and most of the spin-off titles for 16 years, and had worked with some of the best illustrators in the history of the medium – Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr, Barry Windsor-Smith, Arthur Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz, Marc Silvestri, Alan Davis, John Buscema – and had learned how to write to make the most of their respective styles. Claremont very quickly learned how to best utilize Lee and capitalized on his skill for drawing sexy, idealized bodies and the sort of action scenes that made most blockbuster movies look bland by comparison. “Capital Crimes,” in which the reunited X-characters escape captivity in the fascist slave state of Genosha, is basically a string of “FUCK YEAH!!!” hero moments executed with precision and grace by Claremont and Lee. 

The story doesn’t just pay off on the events of the story thus far, but gives readers moments they’d been hoping to see for years, like Wolverine fighting the newly dark and blade-winged Archangel, or Cyclops reasserting his role as the leader of the X-Men. A lot of the most thrilling bits are character-defining moments for new members like Gambit and Cable, and in the case of the recently transformed Psylocke, character-redefining as she takes on a full-on action hero role as a psychic ninja with a machine gun. 

My favorite element of this story is the villain, Cameron Hodge. Hodge started off as a supporting character in X-Factor but was gradually revealed as a crazed anti-mutant maniac with a militia called The Right over the course of Simonson’s runs on X-Factor and New Mutants. At this point, he was barely human – just a head attached to an enormous grotesque mecha-scorpion with robotic tentacles, spikes, guns. As illustrated by Lee, it’s one of the most memorable and terrifying character designs of the era. There’s never any adequate explanation of how Hodge became attached to this vast killing machine, or even how he ended up in a position of great power in Genosha, but it hardly matters. Claremont essentially writes Hodge as a completely unhinged version of George H.W. Bush. He’s lost all connection to his humanity, and is little more than a gleefully sadistic maniac with a psychotic grudge against all X-people, but especially his old rival, Archangel. 

Claremont clearly loves writing Hodge’s over-the-top dialogue (“♫What a day, what a day for an auto-de-fé♫”), and Lee obviously delights in the creepy spectacle of his mechanical body. It makes no sense at all that while Hodge has appeared in subsequent stories, he’s only appeared once more in this form, basically as a mini-boss in the late-‘00s crossover “Second Coming.” This should be one of the definitive recurring X-Men villains, and yet. It’s hard to understand why many artists wouldn’t leap at the chance to draw this version of Hodge, but then again, attempting to compete with what Lee accomplished with the character in these issues seems very difficult and the other art in the crossover demonstrates just how badly you can look in comparison. 

The Omega Mutant

“The Omega Mutant”
Uncanny X-Men Vol. 3 #26-31 (2013)
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Chris Bachalo (25, 27, 29, 30, 31) and Kris Anka (23, 24, 26, 28)

“The X-Men are a family” is a trope I’ve never been all that invested in, as I tend to prefer stories in which the X-Men are more of a movement. Some writers can pull off the “found family” aspect better than others – Chris Claremont established it in the ‘80s, and Scott Lobdell was particularly good at sentimental beats in the ‘90s – but I find that a lot of writers use this as a lazy shorthand for character connections, mostly just leaning on nostalgia for those Claremont or Lobdell back issues than what is written into their own stories. The one writer who really took this idea and pushed it to a logical extreme was Brian Michael Bendis, who over the course of his parallel runs on Uncanny X-Men and All-New X-Men essentially wrote one big story about what happens to the X-Men after their paterfamilias Charles Xavier is killed by his surrogate son  Cyclops in a Phoenix-fueled rage. This story thread comes to a head in “The Omega Mutant,” an arc that is framed by rival X-Men factions having to come together for the reading of Xavier’s will. 

Bendis’ X-Men is a family divided. Cyclops, who was radicalized in the prior runs by Kieron Gillen and Matt Fraction, was already at odds with the X-Men based at the school and was now a full-on pariah. At the start of Bendis’ run, Beast – long Cyclops’ closest friend, basically more of a brother to him than his actual biological brother, Havok – was so furious and deep in mourning that he ripped apart the space-time continuum to bring their teenage selves to the present just to spite him. Wolverine had reclaimed the old school, and passive-aggressively renamed it the Jean Grey School. Storm is frustrated by Cyclops’ tactics (though they aren’t very different from how Claremont wrote her in the ‘80s…), and Iceman outright loathes him for his role in Xavier’s death. This is the X-Men as a grieving dysfunctional family, and it rings more true than the idealized sentimental version of the idea. Ideologies clash, long-simmering resentments flare up, and love/hate relationships abound. 

Bendis’ Cyclops is a glorious mess of self-destructive impulses and monomania. He’s obsessed with redeeming himself while proving that he’s always been right, but so wracked with guilt that he’s constantly sabotaging himself because he wants to be punished. His only allies are ethically dubious figures – his ex-girlfriend Emma Frost, his longtime enemy Magneto, the generally amoral Illyana Rasputin – and he’s being watched over by Kitty Pryde, a character prone to harshly judgmental moralizing. He’s absolutely miserable, and every decision he makes just makes everything spiral further into chaos. 

When the X-Men are summoned for the reading of Xavier’s will, the school-based characters are all convinced that their worst fear is about to be realized and Cyclops would be granted full control over the school and the X-Men. But before getting to that part, they’re informed that Charles is married to Mystique – wait, whuuuut? – and that he needs them to look after a mutant named Matthew Malloy so absurdly powerful that he’d spent decades suppressing his godlike reality-warping abilities. Cyclops is furious to discover Xavier’s hypocrisy, and when he’s sent with the X-Men to confront him, he attempts to recruit him to his cause. It’s an act of hubris that, or course, backfires horribly. 

Matthew Malloy is grieving too. Without the psychic blocks Xavier put in place, he’s aware that he killed his parents, and is understandably overwhelmed and confused by his extreme level of power. Malloy is not a villain, and he’s barely an antagonist. He’s just a traumatized guy with a shaky handle on reality who happens to be able to do pretty much anything he can imagine. He’s just a guy who was living a normal life unaware that he was a mutant, and suddenly has Cyclops and Magneto vying to influence him, and S.H.I.E.L.D. looking to eliminate him. He’s pushed over the edge, and it goes very badly. Cyclops dies. A lot of people die. 

There is a deus ex machina in this story in the form of Eva Bell, a time-hopping mutant Bendis and Stuart Immonen introduced who has been mostly a student of Cyclops’ through the run. Over the course of 20 issues or so, Eva has transitioned from being starstruck by Cyclops to becoming a harsh critic of his methods and unstable mental state. She takes it upon herself to fix the Malloy problem by going back in time to a point where she can convince Xavier to do something far worse than simply block a mutant’s powers and erase their identity – she has him make it so his parents never meet. Matthew is wiped out of reality, and the story resets. But Bell goes out of her way to make sure Cyclops knows what really happened, partly to scare him straight and partly out of spite. It’s puzzling why this character has barely appeared since the end of the Bendis run. She’s fascinating and sets up a lot of story possibilities, particularly in her rather bitter relationship with the X-Men at the end of his long-term story. 

The art in this arc is handled by two different but complementary artists – primary series artist Chris Bachalo, and Kris Anka, a rising star at the time. Bachalo, a veteran of several X-series, is so distinctive and stylized that it can be quite difficult to pair him with other artists. Anka, who is also quite distinctive, doesn’t alter his style to ape Bachalo’s but does match his aesthetics and tone. Both artists go for big panels and an emphasis on wide open space in pages focused on Malloy, and allow a lot of room to let the colorists carry emotional tone with a lot of pastels and ultra-saturated primaries. Anka is particularly good at drawing facial expressions and body language and thrives in the family feud scenes, while Bachalo really sells the psychedelic terror of Malloy’s power. They both make a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes look fresh and dynamic. 

“The Omega Mutant” is effectively the climax of Bendis’ Uncanny run. The remaining issues mostly tie up loose ends, often in abrupt ways that suggest that he did indeed leave the X-Men a bit earlier than he had originally planned. It’s a very Bendis sort of climax, focused mainly on several of his core characters – Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Eva Bell, Magneto – acting out on the emotions that have been driving them through dozens of issues. The Malloy plot is interesting, but is mostly just a backdrop for a story about Cyclops’ reckoning and the X-Men’s various ways of processing grief. The emotions are vivid and the interpersonal dynamics are nuanced. It’s a very bold take on the X-Men in general – more of a philosophical family soap opera than a straight superhero thing. 

Ghosts

“Ghosts”/“Retribution”/“Salvation”
Uncanny X-Men 207-209 (1986)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by John Romita Jr.
Inks by Dan Green

This run of issues near the end of John Romita Jr’s tenure on Uncanny X-Men is the climax of years of ongoing plot going back to the late John Byrne period, paying off on story elements involving the Hellfire Club in “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and the bleak future timeline introduced in “Days of Future Past.” This story, which I’ll collectively refer to as “Ghosts” as that is the title of the trade paperback in which it is all collected, is also the prelude to the radical overhaul of the series’ cast and status quo that would happen after the subsequent “Mutant Massacre.” Chris Claremont very obviously intended this story arc to mark the end of an era, and a transition into a phase where the influence of his most ambitious contemporaries – most notably Alan Moore – would be more apparent. 

“Ghosts” is primarily the conclusion of the Rachel Summers plot thread that had carried through Uncanny X-Men for about two years at this point, but originated in “Days of Future Past.” Rachel was introduced in that story as the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey in a grim future in which the Sentinels were largely successful in snuffing out mutants, and Rachel was a brainwashed “hound” used by the government to hunt down other mutants. Rachel eventually makes her way back to the present, and gradually insinuates herself into the X-Men. She’s a very troubled character – she is rattled by the notion that her very existence is impossible in this timeline given that Jean Grey had died, she has severe PTSD from her experience in the future, and becomes an existential threat to everyone once she gains access to the extraordinary power of the Phoenix force. Everyone is terrified of Rachel’s power, knowing that her much more stable mother was driven mad by the same power and killed an entire planet on a whim. Near-omnipotence in the hands of someone this sad and broken? Yikes. 

Claremont deliberately avoids retracing the steps of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” and writes a different sort of tragedy. Rachel’s trauma and anger don’t result in a Dark Phoenix meltdown, but do lead her to other forms of self-destructive actions. At this point in Rachel’s story, she’s fallen into a deep depression, and feels extremely isolated from her friends, and is overwhelmed by guilt and grief. In “Ghosts,” Rachel has a series of vivid dreams in which she is murdered by Wolverine, and essentially wills that scenario into being as she decides to hunt down and kill Selene, the vampiric Black Queen of the Hellfire Club. Wolverine, clearly afraid of this leading to either a Dark Phoenix situation or her simply becoming more like him, feels compelled to stop her. She refuses to stand down, and tells him the only way to stop her is to kill her. So in the final panel of the issue he pops his claws into her chest. It’s suicide-by-Wolverine. 

In the next issue, Rachel is bleeding out in Central Park near the Guggenheim. She’s weak, and can’t keep the thoughts of thousands of passerby out of her head. She’s only alive because her telekinetic powers are strong enough to mitigate the severe damage Wolverine did to her heart and lungs. She quickly discovers that Selene has killed again, and Wolverine’s intervention has done no good at all. Despite her condition, she’s still so powerful that she can locate Wolverine from across town and torture him from afar. 

These scenes, like most anything in this period of the Uncanny X-Men, work in large part because John Romita Jr’s art is so grounded in the reality of mid-80s New York City. Romita Jr draws street scenes with remarkable accuracy, and keeps the reader very aware of physical space. Claremont takes advantage of this during this run, keeping stories close to the ground and full of vivid, specific locations. The character design follows suit, as Romita Jr gradually transitions most of the characters away from traditional superhero costumes in favor of stylish street clothes with the colorful aesthetics of superhero outfits. At this stage the X-Men mostly look like a new wave band. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best the characters have ever looked and it’s sad that almost no one draws the characters as punky hipsters after Romita Jr and his successor Marc Silvestri did so well with this look in the ‘80s. 

As Rachel continues to stumble through Central Park on the edge of death, the X-Men clash with the Hellfire Club and Nimrod, the nearly unstoppable Sentinel from Rachel’s future. It’s the unlikely culmination of years of X-Men/Hellfire Club rivalry, as the enemy factions team up to take down the immensely powerful robot. Half of the core Hellfire Club characters perish in the battle on the bramble, and the rest establish a truce that would last through the remainder of Claremont’s original run on the X-books. This plot development came less than a year after Claremont had fully transitioned Magneto from arch-villain to Charles Xavier’s replacement as headmaster of the school, and highlights his narrative boldness at the time. The Hellfire Club had been the primary antagonists of the X-Men comics for half a decade, and were now being set aside. Claremont was ready to bring in new threats, and to make the moral center of the series more ambiguous. 

Whereas the end of “The Dark Phoenix Saga” ends with Jean Grey’s suicide on the moon, Rachel’s arc concludes by embracing a different sort of self-negation. As Rachel staggers through the park, barely holding her body together, she is dazzled by Spiral’s magic and lured into the Body Shoppe with the promise of being given an entirely new life. Spiral is, of course, a nefarious character, but Rachel is too weak and too psychologically tormented not to be the perfect mark. It doesn’t take much to seduce Rachel into giving up her entire life. All she’s ever known is agony, horror, and failure. Claremont writes Rachel’s final scene as half happy ending, half pathetic tragedy. Rachel departs Uncanny X-Men as a coward, as someone who refuses to face responsibility for her actions and embraces the promise of absolution and/or oblivion. 

This is obviously not the end of Rachel Summers, but it is. This is the clear ending of Rachel’s arc, and true to Spiral’s promise, we never do see this version of Rachel ever again. Rachel Summers reappears about a year and a half later as one of the stars of Claremont’s Excalibur series, and she’s basically a new person. The Excalibur version of Rachel is far less tortured, written as more overtly queer, and fits in more with the deliberately light and goofy tone of that series. There’s some merit to this version of the character and some other later iterations of Rachel by other writers, but all of the pathos is drained out. Rachel, over time, becomes nothing more than a stand-in for Jean Grey in the X-Men during the periods when Jean is dead. The more Rachel has been established as a generic hero or Jean replacement, the further writers get from anything that made her compelling, including her queerness. Attempts to pair Rachel off with men, particularly Nightcrawler, have been incredibly unconvincing and dull. Nothing has really worked with Rachel since Uncanny X-Men #209 for a simple reason: Her story ended. If only anyone, especially Rachel’s creator, could have left well enough alone.

Precipice

“Precipice”
Uncanny X-Men #238 (1995)
Written by Scott Lobdell
Pencils by Joe Madureira
Inks by Tim Townshend

Most of the best X-Men stories are, in some way, about failure. The heroism of the X-Men is more in how they persist in trying to do the right thing and stand up to oppression, not in them frequently succeeding in their goals. “Precipice,” a high point in Scott Lobdell and Joe Madureira’s mid-‘90s run, is largely about the X-Men acknowledging the limits of their idealistic philosophy and suffering for it. 

The story starts with Charles Xavier confronting the X-Men’s prisoner, the murderous psychopath Sabretooth, and admitting that he’s given up on his attempts to rehabilitate him and give him a second chance among the X-Men. Xavier is magnanimous but stern when confronting Sabretooth – it pains him that he can’t figure out how to curb Sabretooth’s homicidal rages, or integrate him into the group as he had with Wolverine, Rogue, or Gambit. Sabretooth is too far gone, and he knows it. He taunts Xavier, bragging about how he never wanted to be saved, and that he loves having the power to kill with impunity. Xavier can only counter Sabretooth’s argument with moralism and reason, but he knows he’s wasting his time. More than any other major X-Men antagonist, Sabretooth represents pure amoral id. He has no ideology, no agenda. He’s just a sadist and a savage. Xavier owns up to his failure, and decides to pass him along to government custody. 

Sabretooth is, by design, the dark opposite of Wolverine. They have more or less the same powers – healing, claws, enhanced senses – but Sabretooth is bigger, and stronger. Wolverine has a nobility and morality in contrast with his violent rages, but Sabretooth is a total nihilist. The only thing he seems to care about at all is causing pain and satisfying his base urges. “Precipice” is the conclusion of a long-running B-plot through much of the mid-90s in which Sabretooth is held captive by the X-Men in the mansion, where he largely behaves like a mutant version of Hannibal Lechter, with various women in the X-Men – Jean Grey, Boom Boom, and Psylocke – playing the Clarice Starling role in different ways.

All three of those women appear in “Precipice.” Jean, who had previously intimidated and belittled Sabretooth, sticks to the sidelines and supports Xavier in his decision. She certainly sees no point in trying to redeem this guy. Boom Boom, a compassionate but not particularly clever member of the junior X-Force squad, faces Sabretooth on her own, furious to realize she had fallen for his ruse when he had been pretending to be mentally impaired following an encounter with Wolverine that seemed to partially lobotomize him. “I trusted you!,” she shouts while slapping him in the face. “I believed your brain was all out of whack! I was there for you when everybody else had written you off!” Sabretooth, ever the sadist, just tells her that she’s an idiot, and then plays on her considerable insecurities about her white trash family and feeling like a loser among the X-Men until she retaliates by hitting him with an energy blast that sets him loose.

Sabretooth’s casual manipulation of Boom Boom is so heartbreaking. She’s not stupid, just guided by raw emotions and obvious self-loathing. Her compassion is real, but also just a transparent desire to stick up for broken losers – like herself, like her own father. Sabretooth and Boom Boom’s dynamic is a dark mirror of Wolverine’s more wholesome relationship with Jubilee, another teen character with a very similar personality and superpower. What if Wolverine was a sociopath? What if Jubilee had no self-esteem whatsoever? 

Psylocke observes this moment between Sabretooth and Boom Boom, and is there to intervene when he’s set free. Psylocke and Sabretooth have a shared history – the two faced off in the issue during the Mutant Massacre storyline in which she joined the team. Back then it was a deliberately mis-matched fight, with the frail and demure Psylocke seeming like easy prey for this brutish psycho. She managed to defeat him, and proved herself as X-Men material. This time around, the duel seems more evenly matched, as Psylocke is now in her Asian ninja body. But it doesn’t go nearly so well, as her attempt to use her psychic power backfires on her, and he eviscerates her. 

The issue ends with Sabretooth having escaped, Psylocke being on death’s door, and Boom Boom in tears, knowing that her emotional weakness may have led to Psylocke’s death, and the inevitable deaths of whoever else gets in the path of this unhinged maniac. The issue starts with Xavier and his top lieutenants having to admit they can’t redeem Sabretooth, and ends with them being proven correct in the most awful way. Boom Boom has to face up to the reality that her faith in the notion of redemption had only made her the perfect mark for an ultra violent con man. 

“Precipice” is more upsetting in the context of Lobdell and Madureira’s previous story focusing on Sabretooth in the alternate reality Age of Apocalypse event. In this world, where Xavier died young and the X-Men were founded by Magneto, Sabretooth is a heroic figure and essentially has Wolverine’s role in the group. Madureira, whose art is so stylized and dynamic that some might not notice the elegant nuances of his cartooning, draws these Sabretooths very differently. The AOA Sabretooth stands tall with good posture, and carries himself with obvious pride. The “real” Sabretooth is always slouching, and moves like a cross between a tiger and gorilla. Madureira draws him with vacant eyes and cruel toothy grin, like The Joker as a wild animal. 

The heroes in the story have softer features, and emote with big eyes and display their confidence – or lack thereof – in how they carry their arms and shoulders. Madureira portrays Jean Grey as empathetic and uncertain, Cyclops as strong and decisive, Bishop as angry and conflicted, and Xavier as cold and aloof. Psylocke appears bold and defiant, while Boom Boom looks defensive even when she’s being confrontational. Madureira rightly gets a lot of credit for his excellent sense of design and his intuitive skill in making his pages look vibrant and uncluttered, but he’s just as brilliant in conveying a lot of information about characters without the writer needing to explicate much about their interiority in dialogue or exposition. 

Fever Dream

“Fever Dream”
Uncanny X-Men #251 (1989)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by Marc Silvestri
Inks by Dan Green

The image on the cover of Uncanny X-Men #251 of a crucified Wolverine is both boldly sacrilegious and totally appropriate to the character. Wolverine is, at the core of things, a hyper-masculine martyr fantasy. His rapid healing power and indestructible metal skeleton make him effectively unkillable, but he is constantly in agony. His power gives him license to be brave and reckless in ways that would be suicidal for anyone else – he’s routinely broken, burned, and gored while other characters are barely scratched in combat. It’s not just that he’ll “get better,” it’s that he’s willing to experience excruciating pain in order to do the right thing. This is a lot more important to the character than mere endurance and invincibility. Wolverine suffers for us all. When Donald Pierce and the Reavers crucify him in the Australian Outback on an X – just a cross turned sideways, after all – they’re deliberately mocking his martyr shtick. 

“Fever Dream” is the climax of a storyline in which Chris Claremont dismantles his second team of X-Men, the group of eight characters he focused on in the three years following the Mutant Massacre in 1986. Up until the Massacre, the cast of the X-Men had been relatively static since 1975, with only minor variations in lineup. After the Massacre, half of the core cast was written out, with Storm, Wolverine, and Rogue remaining alongside four new members – Psylocke, Dazzler, Longshot, and Havok. (Colossus returned a bit later, while Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, and Rachel Summers were sent off to the spin-off series Excalibur and sidelined from nearly every key X-Men story until 1998.) This time, however, Claremont was not as interested in shuffling the cast so much as entirely dissolving the concept of the X-Men as a team. From issue #252 through #274, there are no X-Men, just assorted X-Men characters scattered around the world having adventures in small groups and pairings. It was radical enough to alter the cast of the most successful comic in the American market in 1986, it was even more so to do away with the cast entirely in 1989. This phase of the series represents Chris Claremont at his most narratively ambitious. 

As we come into “Fever Dream,” nearly half the cast is already gone. Longshot had quit, Rogue had disappeared through the portal of the mystical Siege Perilous, and Storm appeared to have died. (She didn’t, but let’s not get into that here.) The remaining members – Psylocke, Havok, Colossus, and Dazzler – were off on a mission on the other side of the planet while Wolverine, who had been disappearing periodically from the main X-Men comic to appear in his own concurrent solo series by Claremont and John Buscema, had arrived back at the X-Men’s secret base in Australia to be ambushed by Reavers, a gang of rabidly anti-mutant cyborg psychopaths. At this point in the story, Wolverine’s healing powers had been exhausted and slowed down considerably, and there’s some question of whether or not he can actually survive the Reavers’ torture. This just feeds into the Reavers’ sadism – nearly every member of the group is a cyborg as a result of being mutilated by Wolverine’s claws, so they’re all very invested in having revenge on him. 

The majority of the story is focused on Wolverine’s visions while nailed to the cross, all brilliantly illustrated by Marc Silvestri at the peak of his skills, but the most significant part of the issue is the B plot revealing the fate of the four other X-Men. When the group return to the Outback to discover that the Reavers had returned, they panic and weigh their options as the gang approaches, ready to murder them all. Psylocke, a powerful telepath with increasingly dubious morality, makes an executive decision to use the Siege Perilous, a mystical portal that had been gifted to the group by the goddess Roma, as a retreat. The premise of the Siege is that those who pass through it will be judged and given new lives – the pure of heart will be given their fondest desires, and the rest will get their just deserts. 

The sequence in which Psylocke gently coerces her teammates into giving up their lives as they know them is one of the most unsettling moments in Claremont’s initial 17 year run on the series. Colossus, Dazzler, and Havok question the logic of running away – surely these four immensely powerful superheroes could hold their own against a group of psychos they’d already defeated once before – but Psylocke nudges them through regardless. Havok is the one to openly question whether he or the others have been psychically hijacked, but is still forced through the portal. 

It’s not entirely clear why Psylocke makes this extreme decision. She’s the most physically vulnerable character and probably the most afraid of a gang of maniacs with machine guns, so it checks out that she’d be the least inclined to face them. It’s a decision that comes as much out of her physical anxieties as her ruthlessness, a character trait that had been slowly evidencing itself over the past few years of issues. She was a demure, posh British girl on the surface, but as cold and cruel as Magneto when she had to be. 

Psylocke’s decision sets in motion nearly two years of plot, as the X-Men gradually reappear in “new lives” after passing through the Siege Perilous, but more importantly sets up the most drastic and lasting change to her character for about 30 years. A few issues later, in the first full X-Men storyline illustrated by Jim Lee, Psylocke would surface in Hong Kong, to be transformed by the Mandarin and the criminal organization The Hand into their perfect weapon – a psychic ninja assassin. As part of the process, they gave her an entirely new Asian body. Psylocke, the woman who forced her friends to give up their lives and identities, had been stripped of her mind, her agency, and her body itself. It’s a cruel karmic punishment. 

Claremont had been obsessed with psychic possession, body swaps, and variations on physical and psychological domination and subjugation for years – almost always a reflection of his obsession with kink – but this was by far the most radical move he’d made, and the most lasting. Psylocke’s  transformation into an Asian woman was only recently undone in 2018, mostly out of concern that it was problematic in racial terms. It was, for sure. But it’s also deeply fascinating, and created many opportunities to delve into the character’s complicated relationship with both her body and mind, as well as allowing for a creepy subtext about British colonialism. 

“Fever Dream” is as bleak as X-Men stories get, which is really saying something. Near the end of the issue, the Reavers’ leader Donald Pierce destroys the Siege Perilous, refusing to give Wolverine the option to escape through it, and casting some doubt on what might happen to the other characters as a result. But there’s some hope. Jubilee, then a brand new character who had secretly stowed away at the X-Men’s compound, witnesses Wolverine’s crucifixion, but also sees him tear himself off the cross. On the final page, the two meet for the first time. The broken, bloodied hero addresses her in the last panel: “So, kid…you gonna give a fella a hand, or what?” 

Riot At Xavier's

“Riot at Xavier’s”
New X-Men #135-138 (2002)
Written by Grant Morrison
Pencils by Frank Quitely
Inks by Tim Townshend and Avalon Studios

“Riot at Xavier’s” is the climax of the second year of Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men, and is effectively the end of the middle part of a trilogy of year-long arcs. It’s also the final story illustrated by Frank Quitely, a definitive X-Men artist despite only having drawn 10 issues in total. It’s a rare X-Men story in which the Xavier School is both the setting and the subject, and the sole threat is a group of students openly criticizing the X-Men and their teachings. The story is a critique of the very concept of the X-Men and the Xavier School in the context of one of New X-Men’s central premises – humanity is slowly dying off and mutants will eventually inherit the world. Does Charles Xavier’s dream of humans and mutants living in peaceful cohabitation matter much if the humans going to be extinct in a generation or two? And doesn’t this just mean that Magneto was always right, and that mutants are indeed superior and should play the dominant role in society? 

The primary antagonist of “Riot at Xavier’s” is Quentin Quire, a precocious teen who is radicalized following the murder of mutant fashion designer Jumbo Carnation and whose “just playing devil’s advocate…” provocations in class spread through the school partly through his nascent psychic influence. “Riot At Xavier’s” was originally published in 2002, but looking at the story in 2019, it’s immediately apparent that Quire is a very recognizable contemporary archetype – he’s cut from the same cloth as men’s rights activists, gamergaters, Twitter trolls, and assorted alt-right goons. He’s an aggrieved, arrogant, sexually frustrated young white guy who is convinced he’s more intelligent than anyone else and loves to get a rise out of authority figures and those he considers easily offended. He has a haircut that looks like something Richard Spencer would hand to his barber and go “this, please.” Quire and his Omega Gang dress up in outfits based on an image from anti-mutant propaganda, declaring themselves to be exactly the thing the humans feared. They get hooked on the mutant power-enhancing drug Kick, kill a bunch of random humans, and revolt on the school’s Open Day to the public. 

Despite the fact that the school has been part of the X-Men mythos since the beginning, there are very few stories in which students of the school are the antagonists, and this is the only major storyline with this type of plot. Morrison’s version of the school is much larger than anything that came before it – in the 1980s and 1990s, the Xavier School and Massachusetts Academy never had more than a handful of students, whereas there’s at least 60 kids enrolled in this era. 

The school is now large enough to have its own social castes. Quire starts off as a classic nerd but throws in with the aggro troublemakers, the blonde Stepford Cuckoos quintuplets are essentially a bunch of psychic Mean Girls, and Xorn teaches the “special class,” a group of weirdos and outcasts in a school for weirdos and outcasts. The special class are the counterpoint to the Omega Gang. They’re the mutants who can’t hide what they are, and are just vulnerable, impressionable, and confused kids looking for guidance. (Within a few storylines, we’ll find out that they’re getting guidance from the worst possible person.) The Omega Gang come at their radical poses and performative rebellion from a position of relative privilege – aside from the grotesque gelatinous idiot Glob Herman, they can all pass as human. The real freaks just want to be regular kids. 

“Riot at Xavier’s” stands as one of my favorite X-Men stories, or perhaps even my single favorite if pressed. But like a lot of the best elements of Morrison’s New X-Men run, it can be bittersweet to revisit because of how subsequent writers have used his characters and ideas. Quentin Quire appears to die at the end of the story but is eventually revived by Greg Pak in Phoenix: Endsong and is used extensively as a lead character in Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men, another school-centric series. Aaron’s version of Quire is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of everything about “Riot at Xavier’s.” Aaron ignores every toxic and fascistic element of Quire’s character, and writes him as a vain and preening faux-rebel – just a silly punk kid who acts out but means well. This toothless version of Quire has become the most common version of the character, to the point that it might surprise new readers to find out he was originally conceived as an antagonist. 

I can’t imagine what “Riot at Xavier’s” must have looked like from Aaron’s point of view. While Morrison’s vision of Quire is sympathetic – the emotional roots of his anger and alienation are well established, his investment in advancing the rhetoric of the Xavier School beyond the simplicity of Xavier’s dream is earnest, he admits that the riot was done partly just to impress the Cuckoos – he’s still a murderous sociopath. This character, who would be awfully useful as originally conceived for contemporary stories, is completely defanged now. From the perspective of the political culture of 2019, in which the Quentin Quires of social media have demonstrably made the world a worse place, Aaron’s glib dismissal of Quire’s actions in “Riot” as just wacky teen hijinks strikes me as emblematic of Obama-era naive faith that young right wing creeps were more of a nuisance than a sign of much worse things to come.